THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN
1/2
Sensual but slow tale of three Hanoi sisters and their husbands and/or lovers.
Running time: 112 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexuality). In Vietnamese with English subtitles. At the Quad Cinema and East Side Playhouse.
FOR all its virtues, this is not a film to see on less than a good night’s sleep.
Writer-director Tran Anh Hung’s third feature (after “Cyclo” and “The Scent of Green Papaya”) is so gorgeously photographed you want to jump on the next plane to Vietnam. But its plot – about three sisters and their love lives – is very hard to follow, and often slow.
It doesn’t help matters that two of the sisters look very similar. Or that two of the husbands’ mistresses also look a lot like the sisters.
Or that the youngest and prettiest sister is so transformed by the different hairstyles she wears, you think you’re watching three different women.
Even the names add to the general confusion. The present lover of one sister is called Tuan; the lover of the sisters’ dead mother was called Toan.
The youngest sister, Lien (Tran Nu Yen-Khe), shares a large, airy apartment with her actor-brother Hai (Ngo Quang Hai). She flirts with him constantly, notes how often people mistake them for a handsome couple, and has begun climbing into his bed at night.
Lien works in a cafe run by her older sister, Suong (Nguyen Nhu Quynh), who is married to a nature photographer named Quoc (Chu Hung). Suong has long been having an affair with Tuan (Le Tuan Anh), but draws the line at actually speaking to him. Her husband, with whom she has a little boy, has an adulterous secret of his own.
The middle sister Khanh (Le Khanh) is married to a novelist and is desperate to get pregnant.
In this relatively privileged bohemian milieu, nobody works very hard.
The characters live in lovely places filled with songbirds and houseplants, enjoy the works of Lou Reed, and can somehow afford to fly down to Ho Chi Minh City and stay in swanky hotels.
But beneath the idyllic surfaces of their lives, everyone is grappling with questions of love, desire and fidelity.
Similar in its lushness and lethargic pace to Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” “Vertical Ray” isn’t nearly as well-acted or as coherent.
